Sea otters are the only marine mammal that regularly uses stone tools — and many carry a single favourite rock in a loose skin pouch under the left forearm for years, sometimes for life. A 2024 Science paper explains why the habit matters more than it looks.
Two hours after the Eagle touched down and six hours before Armstrong opened the hatch, Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the lunar surface — a private ceremony NASA asked him to keep off the air because of a pending atheist lawsuit over Apollo 8's Genesis reading.
NASA's Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory has spent three decades quietly identifying the competency that best predicts whether long-duration crews hold together. It isn't piloting or engineering — it's the small daily habits of tidiness, attention, and remembering that a crewmate's kid turns eight on Tuesday.
A Boeing 777 pilot flying North Atlantic routes at 38,000 feet absorbs cosmic radiation at four to six microsieverts per hour — up to 5,000 microsieverts a year, more than the average U.S. nuclear plant worker. In 2025 the National Academies urged the FAA to finally treat it as an occupational hazard.
For nearly three decades, scientists have searched for proof that the universe's oldest explosions leave an eternal fingerprint in ghostly particles—and now they may have finally found it.
A broken wheel became a shovel, revealing mineral signatures that suggested Mars once harbored conditions suitable for microbial life.
A computer built to handle one task nearly derailed the moon landing when it tried to do too many things at once—and saved itself by knowing what to forget.
A possible solution to Saturn's moon mystery: nitrogen bubbles rising through alien seas as conditions shift beneath the surface.
On Saturn's moon Titan, vast dune fields are made not of sand but of frozen water and exotic organic chemicals—raising questions about how such alien landscapes form and evolve.
A century-old assumption about river behavior crumbles: meanders may have wound across barren Earth long before the first plant took root.
A frozen pinprick orbiting Saturn may be broadcasting signals of habitability to anyone listening—if we can learn to read them.
What astronomers missed in decades of Hubble data, an AI found in less than three days—and it's only just beginning to catalog what's out there.
The discovery rewrites when humans first took control of fire, challenging assumptions about the cognitive leap required to transform spark into flame.
The moment instant communication erased the Atlantic, and the global economy—along with human anxiety—rewired itself forever.
Researchers working with material returned by China's Chang'e-5 mission reported on 16 July 2025 that they had used concentrated light to release water from lunar soil and feed it directly into reactions producing oxygen, hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
On 30 July 2025, a team from the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering (IDSSE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a paper in Nature reporting…
